SOCIAL MEDIA IS BAD. It takes your worst parts—your vanity, your ignorance, your credulity—and makes them even worse. It weakens your ability to focus. It distracts you while you drive. It makes you hate people you should feel unity with and envy people you should find insufferable. It turns you...

Up Front

Glacier National Park is drip, drip, dripping into a puddle. People and companies and governments are cutting down trees to burn them to save the planet from global warming, mixing the sacrificial trees with oh-so-clean coal,...

Elsewhere in the Humanist:

The Ending Needs Work: Humanists Can Lead on End-of-Life Decisions

Jennifer Ouellette describes herself as a “recovering” English major who stumbled into science writing by accident and has been “exploring her inner geek ever since.” Ouellette often uses pop culture, fantasy, and science fiction as tools to communicate scientific ideas to mainstream...

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Natural Disasters & the Humanist Response

LAST FALL THE UNITED STATES and the Caribbean were battered by three devastating, record-breaking hurricanes—Harvey in Texas and Louisiana, Irma in the Caribbean and Florida, and Maria in Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands. The destructive power of these hurricanes was extreme,...

Elsewhere in the Humanist:

Five Fierce Humanists: Unapologetically Black Women Beyond Belief

Introduction by Christopher Cameron IT IS A WELL-KNOWN FACT that black women have served as the backbone of the black church since its inception. Black women raised funds for church buildings, evangelized for their churches around the world, and constituted the majority...

Elsewhere in the Humanist:

#WeToo?

The secular community is having a #MeToo moment. Some say it’s about time. Others say not so fast. In 1915 the American suffragist and writer Alice Duer Miller published a slim and delightful book of poetry titled Are Women People? In one...